But now the reality of the tunnels hit me like a punch to the stomach: I was going to have stay underground for up to twenty-four hours.
I had no idea what that meant. Not really. Were there lights? Would I be able to see where I was going? Would I get lost? And if I did get lost, would someone eventually find me or would they just let me die under Blackwell Falls?
It wasn’t like there had been anyone to ask. No one would have told Bram’s little sister about the Hunt. They probably would have denied it existed at all.
I suddenly wished I’d had the courage to tell Daisy. She would’ve been scared for me — she might even have tried to talk me out of it — but eventually she would have understood.
And at least someone would know where I was if I went missing.
I forced myself to breathe. I was Bram’s little sister. They weren’t going to let me die in the tunnels.
“Start the clock, Titus.” The command came from one of the other men in the hawk masks, and when I followed the sound of his voice I realized his eyes were impossibly blue.
And he was staring. At me.
“You’ll have a five-minute head start,” Titus said, pulling out his phone.
The brunette next to me grabbed for my hand and started pulling me closer to the door. “Come on, we don’t want to be last in.”
I was too terrified to do anything but let her pull me along, and the scent of the tunnels got stronger and more primal as we came closer to the open door.
“The Hunt starts in three… two…” Titus said, “one.”
I was pulled into the tunnel by the brunette (I still didn’t know her name) and swallowed by darkness so total it took my breath away.
I gasped in shock.
“It’s okay,” she said in the blackness. “Just keep moving. We have to get as far away from the doors as we can.”
Behind us the other girls were nothing more than footsteps on the rocky floor under our feet and the occasional swear word as they flooded the tunnels.
“Ow, fuck,” one of them said.
I almost went down when someone slammed into my shoulder, but a second later I felt the tunnels open up around us as we broke free from the other girls. Or maybe they’d broken free of us. The darkness was so total it was impossible to tell.
And then a beam of light shone through the dark and I realized the brunette was holding up her phone.
“I can’t stay with you.” She was panting and I realized I was short of breath too, although I couldn’t have said if it was because we’d been running or because I was so scared I was about to pee myself. “But use your phone to light the way when it’s dark, get in as deep as you can before the men start hunting, hide if you need to, if you can.”
“Hide…?”
She reached into her pocket and removed two translucent sticks. “Use these if your battery dies.”
I took them from her and realized they were glow sticks.
She glanced back over her shoulder as she moved away from me. “I’m Julia by the way. Good luck.”
“Cassie…”
“Run, Cassie.” She followed her own advice and was gone a few seconds later.
I hesitated, pulled out my phone, and ran into the darkness.
6
VIGO
I bouncedon the balls of my feet while I watched the clock, counting the minutes until we could enter the tunnels after the girls. It was like Christmas, the anticipation almost as good as the event itself, and just like with Christmas, I couldn’t fucking wait.